Sales tax? We are not subject to collect sales tax unless you sell products. If you are referring to self employment tax both notaries and notary signing agents pay self employment tax. The notarial acts is what are tax-exempt (self employment) We still have to pay federal taxes on it. There is no information on the SOS or NNA with this info. It is found on the IRS website but only specify notary public not signing agents because you can be a notary public and not a signing agent but you can not be a signing agent without being a notary public.
But I’ll give you an example, in TX our max fee is $6 per acknowledgement right. So let’s say someone calls you to notarize a VSF form so that they can get their vehicle out the tow yard. It’s one piece of paper with one acknowledgement one signature. That’s $6. Now let’s say you have to travel to that person’s location and for the sake of this example I’m just going to say the travel fee is $1. So the total this person will pay is $7.
Now when you do your taxes, let’s say it was the $7 for the year,$6 of your total $7 are self employment tax exempt because that is the fee for your notarial acts. Everything else that you charge whether it be a travel fee, a late fee, a print fee, things like that you pay taxes on all of that.
So when it comes to a closing that same concept applies. Let’s say you have a buyer closing for $100 and it’s one signer. When you look over the paperwork you can see that there is a total of 8 acknowledgments. With one signer that is a total of $48. Now when you do your books it is highly recommended to itemize if you want to take advantage of the tax exemption benefit. On your receipt or invoice, however you want to do it, you would put $48 for notarial acts and $52 for whatever else (which equals the total fee). So when you do your taxes at the end of the year $48 is exempt from self-employment tax and the $52 is regular taxation. Sorry so lengthy but I wanted to make sure I explained it right. Does this make sense?